{"id":36003,"date":"2025-02-11T15:26:55","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T22:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=36003"},"modified":"2025-02-11T18:13:53","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T01:13:53","slug":"share-my-frustration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=36003","title":{"rendered":"Share My Frustration"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"tenor-gif-embed\" data-postid=\"7272048\" data-share-method=\"host\" data-aspect-ratio=\"1.95918\" data-width=\"100%\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tenor.com\/view\/computer-rage-gif-7272048\">Computer Rage GIF<\/a>from <a href=\"https:\/\/tenor.com\/search\/computer-gifs\">Computer GIFs<\/a><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" async src=\"https:\/\/tenor.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Donna and I were on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base Monday to do our taxes. There&#8217;s a retiree services office there, manned by volunteers, and tax preparation is one of the services they offer (and they are great).<\/p>\n<p>We decided to visit the base pass &amp; ID office afterward. Even though our retired military ID cards have no expiration date and are meant to last a lifetime, now that the states have &#8220;RealID&#8221; drivers licenses the military has followed suit and everyone has to get a new ID card with a chip in it. We had all the required documents with us, so we walked over &#8230; it was only a block or two away.<\/p>\n<p>The lobby was empty, save for a big easel-mounted sign blocking the way to the office. &#8220;Appointments only,&#8221; it said. Since the place didn&#8217;t look busy, we walked past the sign and into the office to ask if they&#8217;d take us as walk-ins. There was a guy sitting at a computer just inside the door &#8230; not in uniform so I&#8217;m guessing civil service (in the past everyone who worked in that shop was military). We asked him if someone would see us since we were on base anyway and he said no, we had to make an appointment and come back then. We said okay, what appointments do you have open? You have to go online to find out, he said. When we asked if he could do it for us, he said no, we had to do it ourselves. And gave us a slip of paper with a QR code on it: just scan the code with your smartphone, he said, and it&#8217;ll take you to the appointment website.<\/p>\n<p>Huh. So we walked back out into the lobby and I said let&#8217;s wait a minute, I&#8217;ll go online right here and see what&#8217;s open. I pulled out my iPhone and scanned the code. The website, or appointment portal or whatever, turned out to be a Department of Defense military-wide thing. I had to enter a Zip code, then pick the closest military pass &amp; ID office on a 50-state list, which of course was the one we were standing in. No appointments were showing for that day (even though the place seemed empty), but the next day, Tuesday, was wide open, so we picked one and booked it. Great.<\/p>\n<p>When we got home I realized I had another Tuesday appointment at the same time. It was only a haircut, though, so I called the barbershop to reschedule. But the barbershop&#8217;s closed Mondays and I couldn&#8217;t, so I got on our home office iMac and went back to the DoD appointment portal. It allowed me to cancel the original appointment and sent a confirming email. Great. I went through the make-an-appointment drill again, this time for Wednesday. As with Tuesday, everything was open, so we picked one for the same time as the one we&#8217;d just canceled. Click here to book it, the button said. Click. We&#8217;re sorry, there&#8217;s a problem, please try again. Click. We&#8217;re sorry, there&#8217;s a problem, please try again. And so forth.<\/p>\n<p>I still have a list of base phone numbers from the days I worked there, so I called pass &amp; ID and got an actual human. I explained what was happening. Oh, you should be using Microsoft Edge, she said. Say what? She said it again. I said I was on an iMac and using Safari. Well, that doesn&#8217;t work, she said. Try downloading Microsoft Edge and using that instead. Baffled and bewildered, I hung up.<\/p>\n<p>Then remembered my success in making the first appointment on my iPhone right there in the lobby. So I picked up the iPhone, clicked on Safari (I use the same browser on all my devices), and voil\u00e0: Wednesday booked and confirmed.<\/p>\n<p>On the iMac at home, everything on the DoD appointment portal looked and worked the way it had on the iPhone an hour earlier. Everything, that is, except for the &#8220;book appointment&#8221; button. Why that should be is a mystery to me and will remain so.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft Edge? That&#8217;s some fucked up shit. To navigate a DoD-wide web portal that&#8217;s supposed to serve millions of active-duty and retired military personnel but that only works correctly with one specific browser (and nowhere on the site does it tell you that; you&#8217;re on your own to dig that information out) &#8230; well, that&#8217;s unsat, Uncle Sam. We have to do better.<\/p>\n<p>Good for you, DoD, I&#8217;m not Elon Musk, &#8217;cause if I was I&#8217;d sic Big Balls on you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s unsat, Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,2,6],"tags":[1545,4721,4722],"class_list":["post-36003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military","category-personal","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-bureaucracy","tag-realid","tag-shitisfuckedupandbulllshit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36003"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36014,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36003\/revisions\/36014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}